1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of manufacturing a coil assembly of a rotary electric machine.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the related arts, various methods have heretofore been proposed as a method of manufacturing a coil assembly of a rotary electric machine. For instance, Japanese Patent Application Publication 2002-176752 (Patent Publication 1) proposes a method in which a plurality of coil wire segments is simultaneously woven using a pair of plate-like winding cores placed in opposition to each other. Japanese Patent Application Publication 2004-104841 (Patent Publication 1) proposes a method of weaving coil wire segments into a coil assembly. The weaving method includes: a preparing step to prepare first and second coil wire segments, each subjected to a winding step to have a triangular wave shape; an advancing step to rotate the second coil wire segment about its axis by 90 degrees with respect to the first coil wire segment and advance the second coil wire segment toward the first coil wire segment to increase an overlapping state between the first and second coil wire segments by a half turn; and a rotating step to rotate the second coil wire segment about its axis further by 90 degrees. The advancing step and the rotating step are repeatedly conducted to cause the second coil wire segment to be sequentially woven to the first coil wire segment by a half turn.
However, with the weaving method disclosed in Patent Publication 2, the weaving step is conducted using the coil wire segments of triangular wave shapes. In order to obtain a winding member of a final shape (see FIG. 2 of Patent Publication 2), after the weaving step, a deforming step needs to be conducted to deform a linear portion of each coil wire segment using a movable member (see FIGS. 3 and 4 of Patent Publication 2). Therefore, an issue arises with the occurrence of an increase in the number of man-hours required and there is a risk of damage occurring to an insulating film covering a surface of each coil wire segment when performing the deforming step.